[Mixminion-it] Welcome to our first international colleague

[dirtydog a autistici.org]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

daif9Opi wrote:
> Hi to all and thanks again Marco :),

Hi Antonio,

welcome to the list!

>
> I'm a PhD student in low power crypto hardware design (or something like
> that, I believe) that is a bit tired of not contributing enough to alter
> a reality that doesn't satisfy me in terms of civil liberties and openness.
>
> After set a Tor relay and maintained it for some time I decided to take
> a look into which projects I could do something useful and realized that
> mixminion, which I had been using for a long time, didn't have any
> substantial changes during the past years nor the number of servers were
> considerable. I thought, maybe a Thunderbird extension could put more
> ppl into remailers again and make some pay attention to the current
> status of mixminion.

I work as software engineer for a small software house developing
various kinds of software. I know a bit of cryptography because of my
PhD side activities, while my main research area was software
verification. I know Tor as a user, not really much more than that.

>
> And well, I love this synchronicities...
>
> As far as I understood form the last thread (my spanish helps a little
> bit!)  are you working in functional extension to Thunderbird, right ?
> Could you translate for me some of the features from the last thread ?

Yes, it is a Thunderbird extension. At the moment it consist of a bunch
of xul overlays and dialog windows with their javascript code. No XPCOM
components for the moment, but it may be worth to build one in the
future. Mixminion is invoked using the IPC library. I basically make an
array with the proper options, give Mixminion some inputs like user
password and get its output. I tried to work without IPC but it seemed
impossible to access its std-in,out,err, making things quite hard.

At moment the extension allows you to (among brackets there is where you
can find the functionality):

- - send/enqueue a message through mixminion (overlay for
messageCompose.xul).

- - Reply to a SURB taken from a file  (overlay for messageCompose.xul).

- - Build and attach a SURB to your forward and reply messages (send
option dialog box).

- - Set Mixminion path in a preference window (item in "MixGui" menu).

- - Get a list of servers infos (item in "MixGui" menu).

- - List, flush and clean message queue (item in "MixGui" menu).

- - Create and inspect a SURB file (item in "MixGui" menu).

- - See and clean the output of Mixminon calls from the extension.

For the next future the idea was to implement:

- - decode received messages like enigmail decodes crypted messages (when
message is loaded or on demand maybe according to user options).

- - Allow the user to select the path on which its message will be sent.

- - Integration with Enigmail.

- - Allow the user to save sent and decoded messages.

- - Add other user options like about saving messages, path features and
automatic behavior settings.

- - File attachments.

- - Localization.

- - Help.

- - Improvement of some existing features. Especially in the beginning I
mainly tried to find a way to make it work and likely there are smarter
ways to perform some of the tasks.

>
> As Marco wrote in the last thread, I have been playing a little with the
> mozilla extension system to make something but not really seriously yet.
>
> Also, I'd like to remark that maybe connecting first to the Tor network
> (optionally) until the number of mixers grows and maybe sending a good
> number of e-mail copies should be ok to avoid comments like "is the
> current mixminion network really "anonymous" ?" or "my mail doesn't
> arrive!" giving a little sense of "trust" to the extension.

Sounds interesting.

About sending more copies of a message, though, it may be a problem with
replies, as Mixminion keeps a list of used reply blocks, preventing you
using it again. Obviously we can change this behavior but I would go
careful on that for the moment. By the way, the same SURB can still be
used more times, for example by different users or from different
clients. I do not know if this is a real problem as the SURB contains
just half of the path. Am I wrong?

Do you have any idea about how to connect to TOR? Could it be something
like the TorButton for Firefox?

Bye

Lorenzo

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAk1wGo0ACgkQj5JKviTtwDx5cQCcCicWbwCjZgmH2XDgQ3iIjFHQ
/L8AnRW26hYOGGj3Jkb1p5wF5kCAs5hV
=TBAO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----